The Circuit brings films like Maelström and stars like Atom Egoyan, Sarah Polley and Bruce McDonald to small theaters, town halls and arts centers in 75 communities around Canada. All told, more than 140,000 people attended screenings last year, generating $640,000 in revenues. Backed since 1995 by the Toronto International Film Festival, the Circuit acts as a liaison among filmmakers, distributors and local arts centers. Proceeds from screenings are re-invested in the community, helping fund fine-arts scholarships for local students and smaller arts institutions. "Cam has made the whole thing work," says TIFF director Piers Handling. "I hate to use the word visionary, but I think there's something very prescient about what he's doing right now as regular exhibition becomes more homogenized in what it shows."

Rob Demerling, director of the Lynnwood Arts Centre in Simcoe, Ont., credits the Circuit with helping save his institution. "We were in the throes of extinction," he says. "I think Cam is one of the best things that has happened to film in Canada," enthuses Brian Meehan, of Museum London, the Film Circuit venue in London, Ont. A growing legion of film buffs are proving Meehan right by voting with their seats.
-By Steven Frank. Reported by Susan Catto/Toronto

MEAL EXCHANGE:
Rahul Raj
One day in 1993, Rahul Raj decided he couldn't eat $1,280 worth of food. The challenge came up because Raj, like other freshmen in dorms at Wilfrid Laurier University, was required to invest in a two-semester meal plan. When the university wouldn't let the self-described "light eater" buy a smaller plan, Raj decided he would donate his excess meals, or the monetary equivalent, to less fortunate local people-and persuade others to do the same. The result was Meal Exchange, an extraordinary program that has expanded to 21 Canadian universities, with more expected to come to the table soon.

Now run at the grass-roots level by about 50 volunteer staff members from their homes, Meal Exchange helps the needy by encouraging students to give the cost of a dorm meal each semester to food banks and other charities, or to donate all the nonperishable foods in their dorm rooms at the end of each academic year. This year Raj, 25, still the program's volunteer president, expects to raise $130,000, which would allow charity organizations to supply about 80,000 meals. The nonprofit has only one full-time employee-a general manager. Says Raj: "We want to be on every campus in Canada by the end of the 2003-04 academic year."

Almost as remarkable as the Meal Exchange's success is the puny financing it required. Raj put up $1,900 to keep it going until he graduated from Wilfrid Laurier in 1997, when he won a two-year, $16,000 grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation. After that ran out, Raj used two personal lines of bank credit worth $40,000, which have kept the organization going for two years. "I can't afford it," Raj says. "But I didn't want 411/42 years of effort to fall apart when the grant ran out." Help came in February, when the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation in Montreal provided a five-figure cash infusion over 18 months. Meantime, Raj holds down a day job as a manager for Nutella and Tic Tac at Ferrero Canada in Montreal, as he has since 1999. He spends 30 hours a week-at night-keeping the meals coming.
-By Steven Frank. Reported by Linda Gyulai/Montreal

YOUTH FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SANITY:
Ocean Robbins
As a teen, Ocean Robbins wanted to change the world; his schoolmates seemed caught in apathy. That inspired Robbins, then 16, to found Youth for Environmental Sanity (YES!), an organization he hoped would mobilize his generation to save the planet. Robbins, a British Columbia native whose family moved to California when he was 10, has since seen his idea grow into a mini-movement that spans environmental consciousness raising, leadership training and community building. More than 600,000 students in seven countries have taken part in YES! events in schools over the past 11 years, at week-long summer camps and workshops, to network and share stories but also to plan their own environmental and social-justice organizations.

"Part of my mandate is to help my generation see the power we have," says Robbins, now 27, who works full time from his home in Santa Cruz, Calif., as president of YES!. Robbins and Canadian colleague Tad Hargrave helped YES! expand in 1997 to a worldwide network by creating Youth Jams, which give young leaders the opportunity to connect with one another and with business and civic leaders.

With a budget of $400,000, YES! runs a wide range of programs for youths, from the gifted to the disadvantaged. The organization's Urban Habitat Camps are grass-roots leadership seminars that bring together about 30 young people (15- to 25-year-olds) at workshops and presentations in low-income, inner-city and indigenous communities. In 1999 several young people, including Winnipeg Cree activist Clayton Thomas Muller, met at a YES! event and formed the Indigenous and Non-indigenous Youth Alliance, a cross-cultural network that now stretches from Chile to Greenland and works to improve the economic and cultural status of aboriginal peoples.

Robbins has a new job as father to six-month-old twin boys, who often sit with him at the computer as he writes messages to YES! alumni. In the Robbins' house, you're never too young to get involved.
-By Leigh Anne Williams. Reported by Susan Catto